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March 20, 2023 - Doug Collins Podcast
27:07
No Easy Answers
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
In this house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Doug Collins Podcast.
Just a few minutes, I'm going to share some stuff with you that's been sort of building up.
And it's just going to be from the heart.
It's going to be, you know, just very candid about where we are in the election cycle, what's been going on in the last little bit, what I see coming up, what I fear coming up a little bit.
But also maybe just as an early, early, early, if you would, guideline to what we're going to see in the election cycle coming up.
We're going to get to that in just a few minutes.
Folks, I want to say, though, we're coming off of a new week, starting Monday here.
I just have to say that a couple of things this weekend.
March Madness started, St. Patrick's Day weekend.
It's interesting how people come together and certain events seem to bring us all together.
And I say this not flippantly because, again, most of your brackets were busted by Thursday afternoon when you had...
Arizona and Virginia both go down in Nebraska.
So nobody really was winning it a lot after that.
So it's interesting.
I do think it was pretty hilarious, though, that Arizona got beat and President Biden had Arizona to win it all.
So again, long weekend coming together.
But one of the things that brings us together is commonality of events.
And in a minute I'm going to talk about where we are politically, but I want to talk about as a country as well.
And maybe we can learn from some of these.
So if you're listening to the Doug Collins podcast for the first time, this is not your old political podcast.
This is not just me.
We have a lot of fun here.
We've talked music.
We've had songwriters on.
We talk sports.
We talk politics.
We have great guests.
We talk about hunting.
We talk about golf.
Next, we've got a great episode coming up, hopefully later this week, with Mike McCall, Pro at Valhalla Resort at Innsbruck Golf Club.
You will not want to, especially for all you golfers who are, you know, maybe getting the rust off of your winter non-playing, We're going to have a good time talking to Mike about how we can get ready for a new golf season for personal as we talk about everything else.
We've also got, you know, we're still trying to get back and going to have hopefully here back on pretty soon in the middle of getting ready for turkey season down here.
Mike Waddell, the bone hunter himself, bone collector himself is going to be here.
So a lot going on.
But I want you just to remember for a moment.
It is the things that bring us together.
March Madness.
People in offices who make a bracket and pick out teams, whether they pick them out by colors or mascots or whatever, it brings us together.
Folks, we've got to find more things that bring us together.
Whether your bracket's busted or not, whether your team wins or not, it's the little things in life that make us come together that we need more of.
And today, we're going to talk about that.
So, just a minute.
Be ready.
We're gonna talk about politics, we're gonna talk about life, and we're gonna talk about what you need to watch for in this year's already burgeoning political cycle.
Be back in just a minute.
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Okay, I promised you back here to start the week off.
This one's been festering in me a little bit.
This is a podcast that I just wanted to talk to you for just a little bit on.
And it may not be a long podcast, but it's going to be one of the more meaningful ones that I'm hopeful that you'll take to heart as we start dealing with this new election cycle across the country.
And one of the things that I want to talk about is where we are right now.
And I'm very concerned.
I'm going to be honest.
I'm not concerned that our country is, you know, on its last leg.
I'm not concerned that, you know, all of a sudden America is not going to be American.
I am concerned, though, that we sometimes forget who we are.
And I'm sometimes, I'm really concerned that we forget that we're a nation that was founded, you know, basically out of our motto, our creed, however you want to put it, out of many, one.
And look, when you understand that concept and in a political election cycle, I'm going to be a conservative Republican.
That's who I am.
You may be listening to this podcast and you're a liberal Democrat.
That's who you are.
Fine.
But we're all under the umbrella of being Americans.
And one of the things that actually brings us together as Americans in this environment is that we have to take our vision of our country seriously and find solutions that work.
Now, some years in some administrations, we're going to think that from one side of the fence, we're going to think they don't work.
And the other time it's going to switch over and the other side is going to think the other side doesn't work.
But one of the things that we've got to come together is, is that we're all entitled to have different opinions.
And that simply having an opinion is not reason to ban you, banish you or blacklist you, if you would.
And I'm talking about both sides here.
Look, as a conservative who's a Christian, you know, there are many things about society that bother me.
There are many things from my faith background that says I'm not going to associate with.
But then again, I don't have to associate with them.
I don't have to ban them.
I don't have to banish them.
I don't have to say they can't keep saying or doing what they're doing.
I may think them to be wrong.
And if I believe it to be enough of an issue, I can speak to them, especially if they're close enough to me and my family or my circle of friends.
I'll say, hey, I think there's a better way.
But at the end of the day, if they want to make those choices and do those choices and go on those choices, then that's what our country allows.
What I have become concerned about as we look at our country as a whole is this idea that you can't have Divergent ideas.
Now, some of those are repugnant.
And we've heard me say this before on this podcast.
The First Amendment is not for...
By the way, it applies to government-sanctioned speech.
It does not apply, frankly, to you and me talking to each other.
I'm sort of sick of people misusing the First Amendment.
The First Amendment is keeping government from keeping you from being able to speak.
It's not anything else.
So let's at least get it back into those contexts.
But the First Amendment is there to protect the government from sanctioning speech and protect you to have an opinion that is not, frankly, the majority opinion.
Or even if it is the majority opinion among the friends that you have, it still doesn't mean that it may be right.
You may have the freedom to speak stupid stuff.
Okay, let's just be frank.
You have the right to be dumb.
You have the right to do dumb things.
You have the right to say dumb things.
Typically, as my faith tradition teaches us, as we grow older, we tend to move away from that.
You know, when I was a child, I spake as a child, but as I grew older, I spake more as an adult.
We grow up, we mature, we know how to do that.
What's becoming more and more concerning in this country is we don't do that anymore.
We choose To say that if you disagree with me, I don't want to hear you and you shouldn't be saying that.
That is absolutely the wrong way to go about this.
And where this manifests itself outside of speech in the political realm Is this becoming more and more common in other areas?
In other words, is we just got through the, and we're still, for some, is sadly mistaken.
If you look on social media, there's still people with triple masking and everything and doing things that, frankly, have not worked and did not work even when Fauci said they would work.
They don't work.
Or they make fun of people who don't wear masks or they're keeping their families isolated from people.
Folks, look, if that's your choice, do it, but don't look at me in a wrong way or in a way that I'm evil because I don't subscribe to your non-scientific beliefs.
Okay.
It's still plenty out there, but we're trying to get through a pandemic.
But what I saw coming out of this was sort of what I just spoke of there.
We began to have what we feel and makes us safe be substituted for what is actually science.
And this doesn't have to be the pandemic.
It can be climate.
It can be criminal justice reform.
It could be psychology.
But if we get a...
A political idea or a thought or an ideology that we then fit everything else into, then we're missing something.
In other words, probably what we will do is if we say that Chocolate ice cream is the only flavor of chocolate ice cream that you should eat.
Everything else is bad.
You should not be a part of anything else.
And then we begin to say, well, science has said that chocolate ice cream has better nutrients for you, and the cocoa has a...
Value for solving cancer or whatever.
We begin to self-aggrandize and bring into arguments to make what we feel is right the only argument.
And then we begin to discount anybody that says, well, no, I like pistachio ice cream.
I like vanilla ice cream.
You say, Doug, what does this matter when it comes to our world?
It's just what we're seeing.
Folks, science as it is taken.
You have to understand science.
And this is a concern.
And I'm tired of liberals saying conservatives don't understand science.
Liberals are the most bending and malleable people when it comes to science and anything else.
Because if you're riding along in a car with a mask on, you've got a problem.
You don't understand the science.
Period.
End of statement.
Done.
Okay?
So I don't want to hear this, that it's the liberals who trust science and conservatives who don't.
But science, as was taught to me from an elementary school age all through college and in biology classes, was science is taking an idea, taking something you see, forming an idea, and then testing your idea to see if it is accurate, to find out, is this something that actually can be worked out?
I just go back to my ask.
Masks were told, oh, it'll stop the spread of COVID. No, it wouldn't.
In fact, if you have a mask that was not almost an enclosed kind of ventilator or N95 mask or these kind of things, they only would work so well.
And the microscopic virus that comes through, airborne virus, is not possibly going to get stopped by it.
Fauci knew this.
Others knew this.
But it was easy to tell you what to do.
And you would do it.
Now, not to say that there's not times when they are valid for people with immune systems that are compromised, others.
There are things that you do to take care of yourself, but don't all of a sudden say somebody who may have a different opinion, whether it be masks or vaccines or climate change or gun control or anything else, well, you don't trust the science because the science does differ.
I say that as we get into this political season coming up.
We're in a time in our country In which Joe Biden and the Democrats want you to basically believe that government has the answers and the solutions that you need to have.
That they are the ones that they know best and they will tell you how to be best.
And if a problem comes along, do not believe for a second that government doesn't have the solution to solve it.
And the reality is that's, in my experience, the least favorable way in most circumstances.
Just this past week, Looking back now, it was done in an emotional time to maybe stop the spread.
But just this past week was the 15 days to stop the spread.
Remember when we shut down the country?
And said, you know, if we just slow down, stop the spread, this virus will wear itself out and won't go anywhere.
How'd that work out for us?
It did.
The Trump administration shut everything down.
We ended up in, you know, shutting business down, which led to a plethora of new spending and others to keep businesses afloat.
All the while...
We were learning about what is now at least perceived to be more and more a man-made viral disease that was come from a lab leak and not naturally occurring.
Again, scientists were telling us something different.
And then when the political aspect came into it, they were then silenced into saying, well, maybe not.
This is documented that we're seeing now with calls with Fauci and others about this, where the origins of the virus came from.
As we look toward this next cycle though, conservatives and liberals as well need to be very much aware of one thing.
You need to actually research what you believe.
Liberals who are never challenged by conservatives to think about why they believe what they believe are not very helpful to their own cause and probably Not very knowledgeable in how to defend their cause.
And conservatives who've never had their vision or their ideas challenged from another perspective, a liberal perspective, you're probably really good in chat rooms and watching conservative social media, but you're probably not going to do a very good job for those who need to understand why you believe the way you believe.
Why?
Because you've not had your ideas tested.
These are the things that I want to see coming up in this next presidential cycle.
In the next governor cycle, in the next Senate cycle, in the next House cycle, in the next state legislature cycles, is this.
Let's begin to have the arguments and let conservatives and liberals lay out their agreements, lay out their disagreements, and say, okay, here's why I believe what I believe.
Let each side have time and effort to make sure that they know How to lay out their arguments, be challenged, changed, moved, whatever it takes.
Because when we look at this, when we get to the point where we just simply are talking to each other and not talking about the country itself and talking about the problems that we face, then we're going to miss it.
How do I know this?
Because we're already starting to see bumper sticker answers.
And when a bumper sticker answer is something you can place on the back of a bumper sticker and think everybody understands what you're talking about.
And I also believe that that's what will solve every problem.
Folks, bumper sticker answers from liberals and conservatives are dangerous because they will not typically give you the answer that you seek.
I'm hearing now on the conservative side back to the old mantra of, you know, just do away with the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Commerce, let's shrink government.
Okay, fine.
Good.
I don't believe that many of those departments have a huge, especially the federal footprint they should have, they should be sailed back, especially in education.
But let's just remind you, That a president by themselves can't do that.
It takes a Congress that has to pass the legislation to remove this cabinet post.
Folks, don't let somebody tell you that that's what they will do and unashamedly tell you that that's what they can do.
They can't.
Now, can they work with Congress to get it to be done?
Yes, but that's the way you have to then elect other members.
You have to sell your ideas and you have to make it work.
You're gonna have people say, well, we can balance the budget in 10 years and not be painful.
Bull crap.
It would be painful.
There's no way beyond a massive tax increase, more than we've ever could imagine, that you can balance anything very quickly without it costing something.
Defense spending, discretionary spending, other spending.
It will.
If you let people tell you that it won't, then you're simply playing into the pablum of politics.
And that's not good for anybody.
Democrats will tell you that if we simply have enough gun control, then crime will disappear and gun violence will go down.
No, it won't.
It didn't in many ways in some of the best examples of that are big cities right now who have some of the toughest crime gun laws and gun restrictions on the books and they have some of the highest gun crimes in the country.
You know why?
Because no one in those areas feel like that they're going to be prosecuted for the crimes that they do.
Period.
They're not concerned about more laws on the books banning a certain style of weapon.
They're more concerned on, is a cop going to arrest me if I do something?
And am I going to go to jail and actually pay an appropriate sentence for what I did?
Don't let liberals or conservatives give you the easy answer.
They're not there.
Long gone.
We've got to have honest discussions.
We can't have the liberals say, well, these folks that are coming across the border are just asylum seekers.
No, they're not.
Let's define asylum.
Let's define asylum historically and also legally and going from one country to another.
They're coming multiple countries to get to America.
Why?
Because we have an open border and the Biden administration says there's nothing they can do about it.
That's just not true.
They may choose not to do anything about it, but they have the ability to do something about it.
As we look at this, that with all campaigns will have negativity in them.
It's just part of campaigning.
If you don't believe it or you don't like it, grow up.
That's all I'll tell you.
Because what we have seen over and over and over and over and over and over again is that negative ads work.
If they didn't work, folks, people who get paid lots of money a week to help campaigns win will not have jobs.
They work.
You know why they work?
Because you believe them.
You want to see the difference.
So those are going to be there.
But my question is, it's not simply, you know, who did what in the past and who were they aligned with, but what are they doing, what are their plans, and how do they plan to actually implement it?
Are they being honest with you?
I believe one of the greatest...
Problems that the Republican Party has had in the last 15 years is the line from 2010, and that was that we will repeal Obamacare, repeal Obamacare, repeal Obamacare.
And we kept telling our voters that all through 2011, 2012, and said we're going to do this without having a mechanism to do it.
And you can go vote in-house, the House of Representatives, to do something, but if it never gets through the Senate and never gets the President's signature, guess what?
It never happened.
And so for years, Republicans were able to nick away at the Obamacare legislation, basically gutting it for many, many ways, eight or nine times, that a President Obama actually signed that basically gutted much of the Obamacare legislation, but we could not tell that to voters on the Republican side because all they heard was repeal Obamacare.
They don't care that it doesn't work the way it should.
It's not as effective as what they had hoped it would be, but yet it did have enough of an impact in which it changed the whole landscape of healthcare in this country.
And when we had the opportunity, we failed.
We had an opportunity to change much of it, and John McCain saw fit to stop any further discussion, not even send it to a conference committee.
As we look at this, I don't want to go long today.
We're going to have plenty of time to break this out into smaller increments as we go.
But this is something that I have been sort of seeing as I go speak across the country, as I hear people.
It has become more and more we're willing to accept the easy answer.
We're willing to accept what we want to hear.
I'm beginning to believe it is because we only seek things that will tickle our ears and make us feel good.
Look, I am a conservative.
I do believe the conservative solutions are the best.
But our job is to take those solutions and then give them to others in ways that they will understand and also agree with us.
If we simply call them names and tell them that they're dumb and tell them that they don't understand or that they're big liberals and big government this and big government that, people are not going to understand.
They want to know how it's going to affect their families, their wallets, their livelihood.
And when we as conservatives can make that connection from policy to people, then we can win.
But if you're a candidate out here listening to this podcast today, Look at what your consultants are telling you to say.
Look at what you're saying.
Wouldn't you rather be honest and win them over?
I'm not being naive here.
I can see some of you just in my head now laughing, saying, oh, Doug, yeah, right, uh-huh, sure.
You can be honest, maintain your integrity, and also still deliver an effective message.
Until we as a country decide that we want to deliver effective messages for our country, for our communities, for our families and our friends and our neighbors, then we will continue in this spiral in which one side goes to their camp, one side goes to the other camp, and we never, ever have an honest discussion that can move us forward.
I believe the conservative values are the best.
I believe that we can win in the marketplace of ideas.
Where I believe we will lose is if all we talk about is how bad the other is.
And we don't focus on the real issues ourselves.
And that we accept that you have to be challenged, that you accept that you have to take your idea and put it to the crucible of fire to say what is right, what is wrong, and how do we fix it?
So when you get ready for this cycle, from a presidential perspective, no matter who you want to vote for, and we got some great candidates from Donald Trump running again, probably Ron DeSantis is going to be running again.
We've got, you know, others coming in behind, Haley Ramoswani and others.
Look, it's going to be there.
But find your reason.
Take the argument out into the public.
And don't simply go looking for biased confirmation as to what you believe and then go look for answers to make sure that it's right.
Because when we do that, our country loses.
I'm all for partisan politics.
I believe the founders actually knew and encouraged partisan politics, although many say, well, they never hoped it would.
They never hoped it would be.
But even in George Washington's first administration, politics played a large role in policy.
It does to this day.
When we are forged in the fire of hard times to get us through the easier times, because hard times will come again, that is the mark of a good country.
That is the mark of greatness that America has always exemplified.
We've got things still to face.
If we face it together with all of our many, many interests and put the America that we love at the forefront, then We will see our country come together.
Then we will see progress made, and we will see the things that we hope for become reality.
Our families, our friends, our communities made better, safer, stronger by responsibility, by appropriate use of government, and by a country that feels good about itself.
That's just my thoughts.
I think there's a lot out there that we've got to talk about over the next few years, and we will.
But folks, do your homework.
Don't just accept what I or anybody tells you.
Check it out.
Learn for yourself.
Before you tweet about it, do you know about it?
That may be a good rule of thumb for everybody here.
That's the Monday edition of the Doug Collins Podcast.
Go out and make it a good one.
If you have any comments or you want to elaborate on anything that I've said, go to thedougcollinspodcast.com.
Hit that email button and you will get an email to me and I'd love to hear your comments.
If you want me to come and speak at your group, I'm right now going all over the world country and speaking.
If you'd like me to come speak to your group, please.
Also, you can go on my social media at RevDougCollins.
You can go on Instagram account.
There's a link tree.
You can hit that link tree.
There's a place where you can hit...
Speaking inquiries, hit that speaking inquiry and we'll see about coming to see you and your group and having a good time.
Until then, until we meet again on Wednesday, go out, make it a great day.
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